“Which is?”

  “What the fuck does the Washington Post call him, the ‘last honest man in Washington’? Which isn’t saying much in this corrupt city.”

  “Richard Lanchester,” Bryson said, recalling the epithet often applied to the president’s national security adviser and chairman of the White House National Security Council. He knew of Lanchester’s unequalled reputation for probity. “Why is he your last card?”

  “Because once I play it, it’s out of my control. He may be the one man in government who can head this thing off, circumvent corrupted channels, but once I involve him, it’s no longer contained in the intelligence community. It’s all-out internecine war, and frankly, I don’t know whether our government could survive it.”

  “Jesus,” Bryson breathed. “You’re saying the Directorate’s reach is that high?”

  “That’s what it smells like to me.”

  “Well, I’m the one whose life is on the line out there. From now on, I communicate only with you, directly with you. No intermediaries, no E-mail that can be cracked or faxes that can be intercepted. I want you to isolate a sterile line at Langley, routed through a lockbox, sequestered and segregated.”

  The CIA man nodded his acquiescence.

  “I also want a code-word sequence so I can be certain you’re not speaking under duress, or that your voice is being falsified. I want to know it’s you, and that you’re speaking freely. And one more thing: all communications go directly between you and me—not even through your secretary.”

  Bryson shrugged. “Point taken, but you’re overreacting. I’d trust Marjorie with my life.”

  “Sorry. No exceptions. Elena once told me about something called Metcalf’s Rule, which says that the porosity of a network increases as the square of the number of nodes. The nodes, in this case, refers to anyone who’s knowledgeable about the operation.”

  “Elena,” said the CIA man with heavy derision. “I guess she knows something about deception, huh, Bryson?”

  The remark stung, despite everything that had happened, even despite his own bitterness over her unexplained disappearance. “Correct,” Bryson returned. “Which is why you’ve got to help me get to her—”

  “You think I sent you out there to save your marriage?” Dunne interrupted. “I sent you out there to save the goddamned world.”

  “Damn it, she knows something, she has to. Maybe quite a bit.”

  “Yeah, and if she’s involved—”

  “If she’s involved, she’s involved in a central way. If she’s a dupe like I was—”

  “Wishful thinking, Bryson, I warned you —”

  “If she’s a dupe like I was,” Bryson thundered, “then her knowledge is still invaluable!”

  “And of course she’ll happily spill all the fucking beans to you out of, what, nostalgia? Remembrance of all the good times past?”

  “If I can get to her,” Bryson shouted, then he faltered. Quietly, he went on, “If I can get to her … damn it, I know her, I can tell when she’s lying, when she tries to shade the truth, what she’s trying to avoid discussing.”

  “You’re dreaming,” said Harry Dunne flatly. He coughed, a painful-sounding, rattling, liquid cough. “You think you know her. You pretend you know her, knew her. You’re so sure, aren’t you? Just like you were so sure you knew Ted Waller, a.k.a. Gennady Rosovsky. Or Pyotr Aksyonov — alias your ‘uncle’ Peter Munroe. Did your little visit to upstate New York enlighten you further?”

  Bryson couldn’t hide his astonishment. “Goddamn you to hell!” he shouted.

  “Get real, Bryson. You think I haven’t maintained a cordon of surveillance on that nursing home ever since I learned about the Directorate? Poor old biddy’s so addled, our men could never get much out of her, so I could never be sure whether she knew the truth about her husband, or how much she knew. But there was a chance that she might be contacted by someone connected with her late husband.”

  “Bullshit!” Bryson shot back. “You don’t have the resources to keep a team of watchers on her twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, until she dies!”

  “Christ,” Dunne said impatiently. “Obviously not. One of the administrators there earns a nice chunk of change on the side from Felicia’s ‘dear old cousin Harry,’ who’s fiercely protective. Anyone calls for Felicia, arranges to come by, even drops by, an administrator named Shirley gives me a call first thing. She knows I like to protect sweet addle-brained Felicia from gold diggers or people who might upset her. I take care of my cousin. Shirley always has my phone number wherever I am. So I always know who Felicia’s in touch with. No surprises. Point is, you work with what you’ve got; you cover what you can. Most of the others just seem to have disappeared without a fucking trace. Now we gotta stand here in this stinking shithole all day?”

  “I don’t like it much either, but it’s remote, secluded, and safe.”

  “Aw, Christ. You care to tell me why you went to see Jacques Arnaud?”

  “As I told you, his emissary, his agent on Calacanis’s ship, was clearly working with both the Directorate and with Anatoly Prishnikov in Russia. Arnaud had to be a key node.”

  “But for what? You wanted to reach out to Arnaud directly?”

  Bryson paused. Ted Waller’s words—Gennady Rosovsky’s—came back to him, as they did so often: Tell no one anything they don’t absolutely need to know. Even me. He hadn’t yet told Dunne about the cryptochip he had copied from Arnaud’s secure satellite phone, and he would not. Not yet.

  “I considered it,” he lied. “At least to observe those around him.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. A waste of time.” Always hold back a card.

  Dunne took out from his battered leather portfolio a red-bordered manila envelope, from which he drew a batch of eight-by-ten photographs. “We’ve gone through the names you gave us in the debriefing, ran them through every available database, including every top-secret code-word proprietary. Wasn’t easy, given how clever and thorough your friends at the Directorate seem to be—selecting and rotating aliases using computer algorithms, all that shit I don’t really understand. Directorate operatives get reassigned, uprooted, their biographies rewritten, networks detached and reassembled. It was mind-numbing work, but we do have a few candidates for you to look at.” He displayed the first black-and-white glossy.

  Bryson shook his head. “Nope.”

  Dunne frowned, took out another.

  “No recollection.”

  Dunne shook his head, showed him another.

  “Doesn’t register. You’ve got some dummies in here, don’t you—known fakes, hoping to trip me up.”

  A smile seemed to play at the corners of Dunne’s lips. He coughed.

  “Always testing, huh?”

  Dunne didn’t reply. He pulled out another photograph.

  “Nope—hey, wait a minute.” Bryson was looking at a photograph of an agent he recognized. “This one I know. That Dutchman, cover name Prospero.”

  Dunne nodded as if Bryson had finally answered the question right. “Jan Vansina, a senior official at the International Red Cross headquarters in Geneva. Director of management for international emergency relief coordination. Brilliant cover for traveling easily around the world, especially to crisis spots, and it gives him access even to places where foreigners are normally barred—North Korea, Iraq, Libya, and so on. You had a good relationship with him.”

  “I saved his life in Yemen. Warned him off an ambush, even though the standard operating procedure required me to contain what I knew, whether it meant his execution or not.”

  “Not big on following orders either, I see.”

  “Not when I think they’re stupid. Prospero was quite impressive. We worked together once, jointly laying a snare for a NATO engineer and double agent. What’s Vansina doing here? It looks like indoor surveillance cameras.”

  “Our people caught him in Geneva, at Banque Geneve Privée. Authorizing the rapid-sequence transfer of a total of five-point-five billion dollars through separate and commingled accounts.”

  “Laundering, in other words.”

  “But not for himself. He was apparently acting as a conduit for an immensely well-funded organization.”

  “You didn’t get all this background from a hidden video camera.”

  “We have sources throughout the Swiss banking industry.”

  “Reliable?”

  “Not all, to be sure. But in this case, it was somebody pretty damned plugged in. An ex-Directorate operative who traded confirmable information in exchange for the elimination of a long prison sentence.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Extortion usually works.”

  Bryson nodded. “You think Vansina’s still active?”

  “This photograph was taken two days ago,” Dunne said quietly, taking a pager from his belt and pressing a button on it. “Sorry, I should have signaled Solomon, my driver, twenty minutes ago. Our agreement is that I’d send him a page when you showed up, if he wasn’t able to establish visual confirmation. Which he didn’t, since you made one of your Harry Houdini appearances.”

  “What’s the point of signaling your driver? To let him know you’re okay—that I didn’t do you harm, is that the point?” Bryson’s voice rose in annoyance. “You really don’t trust me, do you?”

  “Solomon just likes to keep close tabs on me.”

  “You can never be too cautious,” Bryson said.

  There was a sudden loud banging on the restroom door.

  “You lock it or something?”

  Bryson nodded.

  “So who’s the too-cautious one?” Dunne said derisively. “Christ, let me go assure my worrywart driver that everything’s jake.”

  Dunne went to the restroom door, tugged at the padlock, and shook his head. “I’m alive,” he called out hoarsely. “No guns to my head or anything.”

  A muffled voice from the other side of the door said, “You’re needed out here, sir, please.”

  “Cool your jets, Solomon. I said I’m fine.”

  “That’s not it, sir. It’s something else.”

  “What is it?”

  “A call just came in, immediately after you paged me. On the car phone, sir—the one that you said only’s supposed to ring if it’s National Security Maximum.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Dunne. “Bryson, would you mind …?”

  Bryson approached the side of the concrete doorjamb, reaching for his weapon at the same time that he inserted a key in the padlock, springing it open. He flattened himself against the wall, out of sight, gun drawn.

  Dunne watched Bryson’s preparations with undisguised incredulity. The door came open, and Bryson was able to confirm that it was the same slender African-American man he’d seen behind the wheel of Dunne’s government-issue car. Solomon seemed abashed, ill at ease. “I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,” he said, “but it really does sound important.” He was looking at his boss, his hands empty at his sides, no one else beside or behind him. The driver appeared not to have seen Bryson, who leaned against the wall, out of the intruder’s line of sight.

  Dunne nodded and, looking rankled, headed out toward the limousine, his driver following.

  Suddenly the driver spun back around toward the open door, lunging with extraordinary, unexpected agility diagonally into the restroom toward Bryson, a large Magnum pistol in his right hand.

  “What the hell—?” shouted Dunne, turning around with amazement.

  The explosion thundered in the small interior, fragments of concrete flying everywhere, piercing Bryson’s flesh as he dodged to his right, just missing the bullet. Several more came in rapid succession, shattering the walls, the floor inches from his head. The suddenness of the attack had caught Bryson off guard, forcing him to focus his energies on leaping out of the way, momentarily keeping him from leveling his own gun. The chauffeur was wild, firing madly, his face contorted with an animal-like fury. Bryson sprung forward, his gun extended, just as another explosion came, louder than any that had come before. A gaping red hole appeared at the center of the driver’s chest, an explosion of blood, and the man tumbled forward, clearly dead.

  Harry Dunne stood fifteen feet away, with his blue-steel Smith & Wesson .45 aloft, still pointed at his own chauffeur, a wisp of smoke curling from the barrel. He looked dazed, his expression almost crestfallen. Finally, the CIA man broke the silence. “Jesus Christ,” he said, coughing so hard he almost doubled over. “Jesus Christ almighty.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The light in the Oval Office was eerie, silvery-gray, lending a somber cast to a gathering that did not need any more gloom. It was twilight, the end of a long, overcast day. President Malcolm Stephenson Davis sat in the small white sofa at the center of the seating area where he preferred to conduct his most serious meetings. In chairs on either side of him sat the directors of the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA; immediately next to him, at his right hand, was the special assistant to the president for national security affairs, Richard Lanchester. It was rare for such a senior collection of administration officials to gather outside the official confines of the Cabinet Room, the Situation Room, or the National Security Council. But the very unusual venue of the occasion underscored its gravity.

  The reason for the meeting was abundantly clear. A little over nine hours earlier a powerful blast in the Dupont Circle station of the Washington Metro had killed twenty-three people and injured easily three times that; the fatality list grew longer as the day went on. The nation, though inured to tragedy, terrorist bombings, school shootings, was in a state of shock. This had happened in the very heart of the nation’s capital —a mile from the White House, as CNN’s commentators kept repeating.

  A bomb left in what appeared to be a laptop computer case had gone off during the height of the morning rush hour. The sophisticated nature of the bomb, the details of which were being kept from the public, seemed to indicate the involvement of terrorists. In this age of all-new-sall-the-time cable channels and radio stations, and the lightning-fast communications of the Internet, the terrible story seemed to reverberate, get worse by the minute.

  Viewers seemed particularly fascinated by the most gruesome details— the pregnant woman and her three-year-old twin daughters, killed instantly; the elderly couple who had saved up for years to come to Washington from Iowa City; the group of nine-year-old elementary schoolchildren.

  “It’s more than a nightmare, it’s a disgrace,” the president said grimly. The other men shook their heads in silent assent. “I’m going to have to reassure the nation in an address either tonight, if we can coordinate it in time, or tomorrow. But I sure as hell don’t know what I’m going to say.”

  “Mr. President,” said FBI Director Chuck Faber, “I want to assure you that we have no fewer than seventy-five special agents on the case even as we speak, combing the city, coordinating the investigations as lead agency with the local police and ATF. Our materials analysis unit, the explosives unit—”

  “I have no doubt,” the president cut him off sharply, “that you folks are all over this like a cheap suit. I mean in no way to disparage the Bureau’s capabilities, but you do seem to be quite good at handling terrorist events after the fact. I’m just curious why you never seem to be able to prevent them.”

  The FBI director’s face flushed. Chuck Faber had won his reputation as the take-no-prisoners district attorney in Philadelphia, later becoming Pennsylvania’s attorney general. He made no secret of the fact that he wanted to run Main Justice, wanted the attorney general’s job, considered himself far more qualified than the current incumbent. Faber was probably the most skilled bureaucratic games player in the room. He was famously confrontational, but he was also too politically savvy ever to confront the president.

  “Sir, respectfully, I think that’s not quite fair to the men and women of the Bureau.” The quiet, calm voice was that of Richard Lanchester, a tall, fit man with silver hair and aristocratic features whose understated suits were custom-tailored in London. Most White House correspondents, whose notion of high fashion tended to be the Euro-extremes of Giorgio Armani, mistakenly described Lanchester as an “unfashionable” or even “frumpy” dresser.

  Lanchester, however, rarely paid much attention to such personal descriptions in the newspapers or on television news. In fact, he preferred to steer clear of journalists altogether, since he strongly opposed leaking, which seemed to be a varsity sport in Washington. Somehow, though, he was admired by the Washington press corps anyway. Perhaps this was precisely because he refused to cultivate them, something most of them had never witnessed before. The label bestowed on him by Time magazine, “The Last Honest Man in Washington,” was so often repeated in columns and on the Sunday-morning talking-head shows that it had become something of a Homeric epithet.

  “It’s just that their prevention efforts tend to go unheralded,” Lanchester went on. “It’s usually impossible to ascertain what might have happened were it not for any particular intervention.”

  The FBI director gave a grudging nod.

  “There are news reports that we—that is, the U.S. government—could have prevented this tragedy,” intoned the president. “Is there any truth to this?”

  There was a moment of awkward silence. Finally, the director of the National Security Agency, Air Force Lt. Gen. John Corelli, replied. “Sir, the problem is that the target fell between the cracks. As you know, our charter forbids us from operating domestically, as does the CIA’s, and this was a U.S.-based operation.”